On Afghanistan, there is much more to illuminate contemporary history, because the KGB’s role in its history from the 1970s till 1992 – yes, it outlasted the Soviet Union itself – was so much more important. As so often happens, when actual documentary evidence emerges, it replaces logical suppositions with much more complicated explanations: no, Soviet leaders did not try to manufacture a Communist regime in Afghanistan because they were raving mad: they started by intervening with altogether more modest aims, and then one thing led to another, much as the present equally lunatic attempt to construct a democracy in Afghanistan started off with the incontrovertible imperative of destroying the Taliban regime, and that one thing led to the other.

While a great deal, and probably too much, has been written by historians on the handful of consequential CIA operations in Iran, Guatemala and Chile, KGB operations in more countries, which were cumulatively more important and which, incidentally, inflicted much more human suffering, were ignored or discounted because of the lack of internal documentation. Now that much more evidence is available, notably including the two volumes of the Mitrokhin Archive, the required addition can be made to the historical record.

The secret goings-on illuminated by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin also belong to the category of the dramatic but non-decisive dimensions of the Cold War, and that is just as well given the imbalance in the secret abilities of each side. In the end, as John Lewis Gaddis does not fail to note, the outcome of the Cold War was not decided by diplomats or soldiers, let alone spies, but rather by the institutions of democratic capitalism, operated by ordinary people for their own everyday purposes.